1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dictionary creation supporting system for supporting the creation of the dictionary to be used in the natural language processing system such as a machine translation system.
2. Description of the Background Art
In recent years, the machine translation system for automatically translating the sentences in the first language in the sentences in the second language by utilizing a computer has been attracting much attention. In the machine translation system, in principle, the input original sentence is segmented into prescribed processing units such as words or phrases by applying the morphological analysis and the syntactic analysis. Then, for each processing unit, the applicable translation rules and the corresponding translation word or phrase are determined by searching through the translation dictionary. Finally, the translation sentence is obtained by joining the determined translation words or phrases according to the prescribed translation sentence generation rules.
In general, such a machine translation system is provided with a user registration dictionary (user dictionary) and a user rule dictionary, in order to assist the effective use of tile system by an individual user having variety of individual demands and tastes. These dictionaries are usually given a higher priority over the standard dictionary in selecting the translation word or in applying the translation rule, such that the desired translation words can be outputted for the expressions unique to each user or document.
In a case of creating this type of dictionary for customization purpose such as the user dictionary or the user rule dictionary, a conventional procedure has been to make a collective registration of the dictionary registration data according to the bilingual translation list prepared by the user in advance, by utilizing either the user registration function provided in the system, or the interactively operated dictionary editing system.
In such a conventional procedure, however, when the terminology list is not prepared in advance, there is a need to carry out a tedious task of extracting the bilingual translation list from the already existing documents, and this task has been a very heavy burden on the user at a time of the dictionary creation.
Thus, conventionally, even though a tool for inputting and editing the user dictionary or the user rule dictionary has been available, there still remains a problem concerning the difficulty of the task for collecting the user dictionary information or the user rule information to be registered by using such a tool.